Traditionally – and this still holds true in many rural areas of Japan – the whole extended family would all live together under one roof. The same house with paper thin walls hosted husband, wife, her mother and his sister, children and elders, and so on… The only way couples could have sex (with privacy) was to check in to a love hotel.

Tokyo has always been known for its 'love hotels', elaborately designed spaces where denizens of one of the most densely populated cities on earth can steal a few moments intimacy in exotic surroundings. Some of the city's brothels are just as imaginatively kitted out. The imekura or 'image-clubs' are imitations of everyday spaces that offer clients an everyday fantasy complete with a woman who plays the part – a secretary in a boardroom, a schoolgirl in a classroom, a commuter on a subway, and so on. For a customer, imekura girl is merely a character who appears in one's internal pornography landscape. In return for that, he happily pays the price of 20,000 yen per 'play'. With that budget, anyone anywhere in Japan would be able to get an average hard-core prostitution service, but there are some men who rather choose to immerse themselves in a false fantasy world. They make phone calls on weekday mornings, make reservations with their favourite girls, and visit image-clubs. In a transient modern city where anything seems architecturally possible, the ultimate erotic fantasy is shown to be that of everyday life

Japan has always had a humpback-whale sized soft spot for kitsch: Hello Kitty meets Star Wars figurines, Godzilla shower toys, and Gundam-themed cafes, for an example. We also know that they have strange sleeping habits: they seem to be able to fall into microsleep in microseconds standing up in sardine-packed trains, and with capsule hotel rooms going for just $30 a night, you can pretend you've been buried alive in a plastic coffin.

Partners Meng Jin and Fang Er’s first collaborative photography project, Love Hotel explores the two artists’ ongoing interest in urban life, architecture, memory and found objects, and the inter-relationship between physical buildings, objects and their social context. The couple worked on-site within the framework of 3-hour ’rest’ periods in various ’short-stay’ hotels creating improvised, spontaneous sculpture works with the existing objects found in the rented love hotel rooms. Slightly amorphous structures, the rearranged inanimate objects hint at entangled anthropomorphic creations in this fantasy space devoid of actual human presence.

After seeing Josh off to the airport, I took the Yamomote line to Shibuya in search of a love hotel for the backdrop of an up coming shoot. I walked right to the heart of Love Hill, so many hotels, with room after room, so many stories must exist behind all those doors. As I wondered through the narrow streets, I looked at different lit of panels on the walls, each room, most occupied, but others weren’t, each with a different style, a photographers paradise.

“Love hotels in South Korea are commonly known to be where lovers go to carry on secret affairs. I was given access to photograph the rooms of a love hotel in Seoul after couples had checked out and before the rooms had been cleaned. Korean culture has many rules and formalities that have always felt very restrictive to me, so I was intrigued by the idea of being where I shouldn’t be and observing things I shouldn’t be observing — remnants of love affairs that were presumably forbidden as well. Absence of color, like the absence of identity, extracts the bed from their original context and realism, leaving space for personal projections and imagination.”

2012

Sexual relations are proper only between a man and a woman who are legally and lawfully wedded as husband and wife. Any other sexual relations, including those between persons of the same gender, are sinful and undermine the divinely created institution of the family. The Church accordingly affirms defining marriage as the legal and lawful union between a man and a woman.

QNY is a collaboration of stories by Guy New York, and photos taken by The Dirty Gentleman. (With invaluable styling assistance from Ms. Dorothy Darker.)
The site explores the emotional, intellectual, and often graphic sides of love, sex, and relationships. From dive bars to park benches and underground parties, the blog follows Guy New York and The Dirty Gentleman as they navigate the sexiest city in the world.

2011

In the early 1970′s, while walking with a friend through a park in Tokyo, photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki noticed that young couples used the park as a space for intimate encounters in the belief that they are protected by the darkness of the night. Equipped with a small camera and Kodak’s infrared flashbulb, Yoshiyuki produced a series of photographs that captures the nightly performance in Tokyo’s parks. In this haunting series of photographs produced between 1971 and 1979 and simply called The Park, the couples, both straight and gay, become the unwitting actors in Yoshiyuki’s play. While The Park has attracted much controversy in 1979 when it was first exhibited and published as a book in Tokyo, it was nearly thirty years later, in 2007, that Yoshiyuki’s project received global acclaim resulting in exhibitions throughout the US and Europe.

2009

Mistress Raven directed a staff of 14 at Pandora's Box, a 4000-square-foot, high-class Manhattan S & M club that bills itself as the "Disneyland of Domination." Interspersed with pages made of latex, rubber, colored gels, and other erotic materials, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas's documentary photographs of the club's highly formalised rules and rituals, its role-playing "vacations from reality," reveal both the customers who frequent the club and the women who command them. To buy this book go to MAGNUM STORE MAGNUMSTORE